Here's to North London's Second Banana

By

Gabriele Marcotti

Updated Nov. 22, 2010 8:09 a.m. ET

In most multi-club cities, somebody ends up playing second banana, whether the metric is success, fan base or hype. Tottenham Hotspur's backers may not like to admit it, but over the years it has grown into that role, perennially outgunned and overshadowed by its fellow North London club, Arsenal.

So how fraught was Saturday's big North London derby at Emirates Stadium for Spurs fans? Decades of bad juju meant fearing the worst was the default setting.

Tottenham's last English championship was exactly 50 years ago, when it famously won the league and FA Cup Double. Arsenal has won two Doubles in the past 15 years. Tottenham's cramped White Hart Lane stadium sits in an unfashionable and unimpressive no man's land on the fringes of the capital and is difficult to get to. Arsenal's gleaming Emirates ground is the second-largest in the Premier League and it has its own tube stop (simply named Arsenal).

Arsenal pretty much screams establishment and entitlement, while Tottenham has a 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers underdog quality. Old-time Spurs fans will regale you with tales of Arsenal skulduggery. Like what happened in 1910, when a property developer-turned-politician named Henry Norris bought Arsenal, then a near-bankrupt club from the run-down and geographically isolated South London neighborhood of Woolwich and soon moved it north, infringing upon Tottenham's hallowed turf. Or how in 1919, when the English first division decided to expand, Arsenal, which had finished just sixth in the second division in the previous full season (1914-15), somehow got itself voted in ahead of Tottenham, a relegated member of the first division.

Younger Spurs supporters may point to other examples of machinations real and imagined. There's the mysterious food poisioning, supposedly caused by some dubious lasagna, that struck down half a dozen Tottenham players on the final day of the 2005-06 season, when Tottenham had a chance to finish ahead of Arsenal and qualify for the Champions League for the first time ever. Instead, Tottenham lost at lowly West Ham and Arsenal leapfrogged it into fourth.

Then there's the fact that Tottenham had not recorded a road win in the Premier League against one of England's traditional big four – Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and, of course, Arsenal – since 1993, a run of 68 consecutive games. So there was little reason for Spurs fans to be cheerful heading into the latest meeting.

Things got decidedly bleaker after nine minutes, when Arsenal winger Samir Nasri took advantage of some nervy goalkeeping from Heurelho Gomes to give the home side a 1-0 lead. And they went from bad to worse inside half an hour when Marouane Chamakh made it 2-0 for Arsenal. The hex was alive and well. More misery for Tottenham.

More Soccer

But sometimes your luck can turn for no real reason. A few minutes into the second half, the coltish, long-limbed Gareth Bale raced to a ball over the top of the Arsenal back four and stroked it into the back of the net. (It was an unorthodox finish. From that position, the textbook would have called for a simple right-footed shot, but Mr. Bale, who is distinctly one-footed, opted for a gentle stroke with the outside of his left boot.)

The gremlins were working for Tottenham now. Just after the hour mark, Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas, standing with teammates in a wall to block the direct free kick from Spurs midfielder Rafael Van der Vaart, deflected the ball with his elbow. Mr. Van der Vaart slotted home the ensuing penalty kick to make it 2-2. While it's not unusual for players to raise their arms to protect their face in free kick situations – nobody likes to be struck in the nose from 10 yards away – the manner in which Mr. Fabregas's arm seemed to move to the ball was, at once, clumsy and sneaky, leaving little doubt as to his intentions.

Arsenal continued to dominate the game and whiffed on multiple chances to put it to bed. Instead, Younes Kaboul – a burly Spurs defender who bears a passing resemblance to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson – popped up in the Arsenal box in the dying minutes to deflect a free kick from Mr. Van der Vaart into the back of the net, giving Tottenham its unlikely, historic victory.

"If you look at this game, it's a mystery how we lost," Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said after the game. "We had the chances, we controlled the match. Sometimes you are not lucky and episodes go against you."

Go tell that to Tottenham fans. Some will say that they've had 50 years of episodes going against them. And maybe in this case, the fact that the streak of futility was broken not by a dominant performance, but with a healthy dose of good fortune, only serves to make matters sweeter.

Warring Philosophies in Toronto

Major League Soccer wraps up its 15th season tonight in Toronto when FC Dallas takes on the Colorado Rapids in the MLS Cup. In addition to a more prudent financial model and more sensible haircuts, one of the aspects that makes MLS different from its 1970s predecessor, the North American Soccer League, is the variety of styles and soccer cultures on display.

Where the NASL, as far as tactics and coaching is concerned, had a distinctly Anglophile flavor – basic formations, lots of running and chasing, crunching, physical play – MLS is much more varied. Tonight's clash offers a fine example of this.

Colorado is coached by Gary Smith, an Englishman who generally favors a direct approach with plenty of wing play and crosses for the little-and-large partnership of Omar Cummings (5-foot-10) and Conor Casey (6-foot-4). This approach, especially popular in England, has been around forever. Hit high balls to the big man, who will either power it towards goal or knock it down for the little quick guy to smack it home.

Dallas coach Schellas Hyndman was born to a Portuguese father and Franco-Russian mother in Macau and spent time working and coaching in Brazil. His brand of football is based around short-passes and constant forward movement and is much more in the Latin American vein.

Running the show is Colombian David Ferreira, whose position is perhaps best described in his native Spanish: "enganche." It roughly translates to "hook," meaning he spreads the ball and "hooks in" Dallas's various moving parts. The fact that there is no traditional English term to describe what Mr. Ferreira actually does tells you all you need to know about the different schools of thought crossing swords tonight in Toronto.

Gabriele Marcotti is the world soccer columnist for The Times of London and a regular broadcaster for the BBC.

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